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Microsoft Patents Sudo's Behavior
Foofoobar writes "Just when you thought all was safe on the crazy patent front, Microsoft has come out of the obvious patent closet to file patent number 7617530, which basically duplicates the functionality of 'sudo' which is found in all Linux systems. PJ over at groklaw has a wonderful writeup on the entire fiasco."
I don't condemn all software patents. Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
But sudo with a GUI? A quick fix I'd suggest to get rid of those bogus patents is to have a rule that says that if a patent is proven obvious later on, then the company (Microsoft in that case) would lose all their patents for the year. That would make them think twice before filing junk...
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the Co-FoundersMeetup in Mountain View is next week
As usual, you need to look at the claims of the patent. For example these points dont really cover sudo:
1. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to present a user interface in response to a task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having a right to permit the task, the user interface comprising: information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password.
2. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising: determining multiple accounts capable of permitting a task not permitted by an account of a current user wherein the determining is based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the current user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; receiving indicators for the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; presenting a graphical user interface, the graphical user interface having: multiple account regions, each account region identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; an authenticator region capable of receiving an authenticator for one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; receiving, through the graphical user interface, the authenticator for one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; and responsive to receiving the authenticator for one of the accounts capable of permitting the task, packaging, into a computer-readable package, the received authenticator and the account capable of permitting the task associated with the authenticator, the package effective to enable authentication of the account capable of permitting the task.
3. The media of claim 2, where the each account region comprises a name identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task.
4. The media of claim 2, where the each account region comprises a graphic identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task.
5. The media of claim 2, further comprising permitting the task.
6. The media of claim 2, further comprising authenticating the account capable of permitting the task and, responsive to authenticating the account capable of permitting the task, temporarily elevating rights of the current user to that of the account capable of permitting the task effective to permit the task.
7. The media of claim 2, wherein rights of the account of the current user are limited by controlled-access software.
8. The media of claim 7, wherein the task is prohibited by the controlled-access software prior to authentication of the account capable of permitting the task and wherein the controlled-access software refrains from prohibiting the task in response to authentication of the account capable of permitting the task.
9. One or more computer-readable media having co
If I'm reading the patent right, they've actually applied for protection of the UAC popup system that appears in Vista and Win7. There's no unqualified patent on user account privilege escalation. Indeed, "su" would be explicitly outwith this patent's claims, as it's specifically about bringing up an interface to escalate when the system determines that escalation will be required, not about escalating manually before the task is attempted.
Top marks to the Groklaw article for providing a thorough explanation for how they can't get a patent on something they're not trying to get a patent for.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
without "sudo". My thanks to Micro$oft for inventing that great program! --Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
...because I couldn't bothered reading all that shit.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The big industry writes them up just as protection from patent trolls and then collude to keep small competition out (ie Microsoft was threatening that Linux was stepping on its patents back in the day).
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway. There needs to be a study of which types of patents coming in provide useful knowledge to the People, and which majority are just wastes dumps of text - and amend the system accordingly.
I would urge the USA to do this now, while it is the leading superpower in which others follow suit. It may have been to our advantage in the past, but not so in the future, imo.
Patent Office: "Rejected."
Microsoft: "sudo patent this obvious idea"
Patent Office: "Okay."
With apologies to xkcd.
MS: Grant me this patent.
USPTO: No!
MS: Sudo grant me this patent.
USPTO: Okay...
Yes, MS has applied for a patent on sudo's behaviour and that is what the title is ridiculing - as should we. Regardless of their success or failure, we're entitled to point and laugh.
In an attempt to patent a thing rather than the software itself, they say:
One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising:
In other words, it's not the operation itself, or the software, but the actual _disc_ that they're claiming. The medium, not the message, as it were. At least it's a physical thing.
I don't know if "downloaded software" would violate the patent, or if they'd try to claim that having it on the server's discs would violate it. (Surely they wouldn't try to claim that your hard disc on which you've downloaded it would violate the patent, would they?)
Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
The suggested punishment might be a little extreme, but the idea is sound. We need some kind of penalty for companies filing junk patents for the electronic equivalent of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide across a thin, moist membrane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
when you attempt to mount a drive that is not defined in fstab. Ubuntu pops up a "enter your password" dialog. M$ maybe up to some dirty old tricks here...
Not true. This is an ISSUED patent; see the patent number: 7,617,530. You can also check its status in public pair (http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair):
10-21-2009 ISSUE.NTF Issue Notification 1
10-01-2009 IFEE Issue Fee Payment (PTO-85B) 1
10-01-2009 LET. Miscellaneous Incoming Letter 1
10-01-2009 WFEE Fee Worksheet (PTO-875) 2
10-01-2009 N417 EFS Acknowledgment Receipt 2
08-24-2009 NOA Notice of Allowance and Fees Due (PTOL-85) 10
I'll draw your attention to the first and last lines in the excerpt from the file wrapper.
That said, the claims DO NOT cover sudo.
...with Windows' lax control of permissions allowing just about anybody to run as a super user, surely they should have a patent for "sudon't" which would probably be infinitely more useful?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
There are thousands of patents for devices that duplicate the functionality of another. Hell, the diesel engine has exactly the same function as a petrol engine, and much of the functionality of a Newcomen engine (pressure difference driving pistons to provide a motive force).
The patent is on the process. Not the end result.
Now the process is pretty much indistinguishable from sudo as well, but if you're going to criticise at least criticise for the right reasons.
And I'm not just talking about sudo/gksudo etc....look at "Policy Kit". This is EXACTLY what this Patent describes. EPIC FAIL Microsoft! The FREE SOFTWARE WORLD has OUT INNOVATED YOU AGAIN! Been doing this for at least more than a year. Been in design/documentation/talked about for even longer.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I am the original author of "priv", which came before sudo, and I didn't see any mention of it. This utility was published in Unix World back in 1987, and basically did the same thing. Does this mean "priv" is exempt from this patent?
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
I couldn't bothered reading all that shit.
Oddly enough, that is exactly what the patent examiner said.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Since when do programmers need to be patent lawyers? Patents are written in fluent legalese, not plain $HUMANLANGUAGEOFYOURCHOICE.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Microsoft's behavior is not a shadow, rather it's darkness, a very specific kind of darkness mind you, it grows, squirms and twitches, it has physical form and it's like a cluster of tentacles as it grabs towards you..
Thanks for telling us that those claims are too complicated for you to read. Please make sure to put that on your resume, because if I was a potential employer looking to hire you for anything even remotely technical, I'd want to know that you give up whenever a discussion gets remotely above the complexity of "M$ sux0rz."
That's not a technical description: it's legalese. I've done my share of technical writing, ranging from scientific journals articles to user and developer documentation, but I'd never be able to get away with producing such incomprehensible gibberish.
It is not uncommon to pop up the sudo dialog in response to a permission-denied error from exec(). Therefore this patent does describe already-existing art. You and a dozen other posters seem to think the error detection has to be in the same process that actually does the access violation.
You are thinking of just the root account, or maybe "su" which is really "login as root".
"sudo" as in "run a single command as root and furthermore examine the commands before running them and restrict them to a set, and furthermore examine the user trying to run sudo to select the restricted set" was developed after Linux was popular.
However I believe a good deal of the work was done on BSD and other Unixes as well.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
(Independent innovation can be affected by the patent system. That in itself is absurd.)
HAND.
I think a better solution would be for the patent to be described using pseudocode or some variation thereof. Since this is afterall a software patent, the application should be written in a form that is legible to others in the field. It would also lead to easier settlement of a dispute since previous art could more easily be compared with pseudocode.
"sudo" as in "run a single command as root and furthermore examine the commands before running them and restrict them to a set, and furthermore examine the user trying to run sudo to select the restricted set" was developed after Linux was popular.
I seem to recall using it long before Linux appeared.
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/history.html
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/readme.html
Unless there's some nuance in your quote that I'm missing.
BTW - gratisoft.us appears to mirror sudo.ws
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
If you're going to claims something copies 'sudo' with 'Linux' please realize that sudo copies su which was around long before Linux.
sudo has more features than su, yes. Everything that 'copies' sudo has more features as well.
Although the patent in this case does not copy sudo, or gksudo or OSX. The patent covers something that detects an authorization (NOT AUTHENTICATION) failure and gives an opportunity to elevate privileges and continue rather than denying the request.
su, sudo, gksudo and the OS X applet all require knowledge in advance that elevated privileges are required.
Do I think the difference is worth patenting? No, its the next logical step. However, if you're going to rant and rave about what Microsoft is patenting, at least realize they aren't patenting a clone of something you've been using for years.
You only make the rest of the OSS world look stupid to the powers that be when you rant and rave and you are completely ignorant of whats being done. We lose credibility and get written off as raving lunes when you respond like this. So please, shut the hell up.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Dennis Ritchie patented the setuid bit in what was probably the first software patent ever, and released the patent to the public domain. I think that counts as a slam dunk prior art, no?
That's true. It's still a crappy patent application though, since it basically covers showing a password dialog box with eligible user accounts (along with some details about their associated privileges) when an operation requires elevated privileges.
Indeed. In fact, this patent reminds me more of PolicyKit (which is GUI-based) than sudo. See screenshot, which almost exactly matches how I visualised the patent after reading the initial claims.
Law is the programming language for the system of society. The problem is, rather than doing exactly what you told it to do, regardless of whether that's what you wanted it to do, the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The patent office needs to be revoked of sudo access.
The claims presented on their web page do not conflict with sudo.
sudo works in a very different way: sudo is about the user saying "i need to be a different user so I can run command Y"
This feature is about the operating system saying "user X, in order to do Y, you need more privilege."
The two concepts are quite different.
Maybe Groklaw folks should use Vista/Windows7, as well as Unix, and try to understand the difference(s) between the roles of the two.
No, we just need to disable Microsoft's access to run /usr/sbin/grantpatent as root in /etc/sudoers. ;)
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
There are multiple issues getting mixed up in the Groklaw article and the discussion on Slashdot.
A patent application has three hoops to jump through to be patentable:
35 U.S.C. 101 - the claims must be patentable subject matter. The question of "is software patentable" is what the Supreme Court is deciding in In Re Bilski. This is the largest issue most of the Slashdot community seems concerned about, and it's obviously a big issue right now. These claims, as written, may be patentable subject matter under current 101 criteria. This is why there were written with all the "computer readable media" language.
35 U.S.C. 102 - the claims must be "novel" subject matter. This is what people object to when they yell "BUT I DID THIS BACK IN 1990!"
35 U.S.C. 103 - the claims must be non-obvious subject matter. This is what most people appear to be objecting to in the present discussion....if sudo existed before this patent, then laying down Microsoft's GUI idea on top may be obvious. (This is NOT a Section 102 issue). This is the part where the patent office (and examiner) screwed up. Even if the examiner couldn't find a reference that taught exactly what Microsoft claimed, he/she should have at least rejected the now-issued claims as obvious. Maybe he did, but half-assed the rejection...who knows.
The Groklaw article points out an "obvious" patent and yells that is shouldn't be patentable subject matter. Those are two separate issues. Yes, it's probably obvious. Depending on your view of software patents, it should or should not be patentable subject matter. That fact that it's an "obvious" idea will NOT in any way be affected by the Supreme Court's decision in Bilski (that case is about patentable subject matter under Section 101).
As an ex-programmer/technical writer who is now a lawyer who's also worked at the USPTO as an examiner (during law school), I feel I must weigh in on the language issue. Patents and patent applications are neither technical documents nor legalese. They are a unique and bizarre hybrid of the two which, quite frankly, I think no one understands. The claims, specifically, since the specification is sometimes actually intelligible in a meaningful way. Everyone (examiners, phositas, judges, lawyers) has trouble dealing with claims and their meanings. The fact that we require pre-litigation court hearings to determine what a claim means (Markman hearings) AFTER the USPTO has already reviewed and approved the claims, which requires determining what the claim means, should be a sufficiently strong indicator that the current style of writing for patents is uncommunicative and ineffective.
To speak more directly to software patents, the USPTO doesn't recognize such a thing literally. Moreover, in general the PTO doesn't look upon the software field as a true technical/engineering discipline, and so looks down upon software/programming expertise in it's examiners. If it appears that the PTO doesn't know a thing about how software works or what is out there as prior art, it is because generally it doesn't know a thing. The field of endeavor isn't recognized or utilized, and examiners often interpret claims to avoid dealing with software (as they don't have the background knowledge to know how to begin researching the prior art).
Software may or may not be patentable ideologically, but as long as the field is given short shrift and basically sneered at by the PTO, no patent process will make sense for the majority of software/business method patents.
AC for obvious reasons.
You can still argue over whether it meets the obviousness criterion, but trying to spin this a "Microsoft patents sudo" is deliberately spreading FUD.
Law is the programming language for the system of society.
Well it's syntax is obscure and imprecise, it's practitioners are mostly B-Ark material, and people write horrible code with it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do.
So law is interpreted. Wonder why our justice system is so slow...
You do something by barring software patents, Once that's done listen to the economists who have studied patents and encourage innovation by ending patents.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
There are alternatives such as trade secrets and first mover advantage. Actually by scrapping patents you may encourage innovation, if a business wants to it's market share then it will innovate. As it is patents may discourage innovation. Tell me, why should I spend millions of dollars to invent something if I can be slapped with a lawsuit claiming infringement? Because patents are issued companies have to horde them just to use for self protection. With a thousand patents if another business comes along and threatens a patent infringement lawsuit then one of those patents may save the business because of mutually assured destruction. This forces businesses to spend more on defense than on innovation.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?